Performance Improvement

Superperformance
8 Strategies to Reach Full Potential for Yourself,
Your Team, and Your Organization

by George Pesansky

THE SUMMARY IN BRIEF

Contents
Many business leaders and organizations struggle to unlock their true potential.
They may achieve brief flashes of high performance, but without a system to sustain
The Golden Hour
success, those moments fade into inconsistency, burnout, and missed opportunities.
Page 2
George Pesansky’s book Superperformance: 8 Strategies to Reach Full Poten-
Escape from the Prison
of Expectations tial for Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization offers a roadmap out of
Page 3
this cycle. Pesansky argues that “superperformance” is not luck but a skill that can
be cultivated. Drawing on more than three decades of leadership and coaching ex-
Find the Friction and perience, he introduces practical strategies designed to eliminate ambiguity, extend
Lower the Temperature moments of peak performance, and create long-term clarity and momentum.
Page 4
Through real-world examples, Pesansky illustrates how leaders can move beyond
Find the Root Cause of rigid expectations, build stronger collaboration, recognize and remove friction, and
Success shift from problem-solving to replicating success. His approach emphasizes utility,
Page 5 the ability to get things done, as the core of creating value and achieving superper-
formance. By integrating vision, strategy, and action, readers can transform isolated
Be Able to Clearly Explain
WHY We Will Sustain high-performance moments into a repeatable, sustainable system for themselves,
Page 6
their teams, and their organizations.

IN THIS EXECUTIVE BOOK SUMMARY:

• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks, waste, and friction that stall progress.
• Harness the collective strength of teams through true collaboration.
• Shift from solving problems to replicating the root causes of success.
• Turn performance into a sustainable system by practicing improvement
like a skill.

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 Superperformance

INTRODUCTION: • Real leaders inspire their teams to hit their full

On the Path to Enlightenment potential, to show them what they’re capable of;
good leaders give them the opportunity to get to that
I train people to solve problems, to learn, and to grow so outcome, unlocking what’s possible and what they
that they can offer increasing value to their organization. can do to achieve that greatness.
I focus on techniques and habits that lead to actual skill
improvements, so that any performer good at their job can
become a superperformer, a stellar example for their peers and CHAPTER 2:
leaders and a source of knowledge for their team. Unlocking Potential
Being a superperformer—and finding or creating other Superperformance is more about a way of approaching
superperformers to support you and your team—is crucial everything that you do. Most of it is about how you define
for career success, no matter what position you’re in. your problem. Defining a problem—and then solving it—
makes these people, these superperformers, differentiators.
Creating value is about the utility you can provide or influ-
ence. Utility is simply the ability to do things that need to be Superperformers are potential force multipliers. They don’t
done, and it’s through utility that you create value. Super- just go out and do projects; they recognize that the way
performance—your ability to provide the greatest utility— improvements get done is by creating clarity and focus, by
happens at the intersection of vision, strategy, and action. giving them a picture of exactly what it is we are trying to
accomplish and then being able to connect the dots on how
PART 1: VISION and why we’re doing that.
Your Outline for Action
CHAPTER 1: Unlocking potential is the heart of superperformance. Here
The Golden Hour are some things to keep in mind as you work to unlock your
Many people think that there’s no way they can ever work own potential or that of your team:
at 100 percent effectiveness (often called zero loss). They • No matter where, when, or who is involved, if you
think this state of perfection is either impossible to achieve, can create clarity, you can make decisions and take
unsustainable, or both. action. When you eliminate ambiguity, you erase
The thing is, all of us have experienced perfection in our doubt. When the direction becomes obvious, you act
lives—the golden hour—when we’re in a flow state and per- instinctually. You have utility.
forming at our peak. And while that flow state may only last • Remember the words of Charles Kettering: “A prob-
for an hour, a day, or a week, it is possible—each and every lem well defined is a problem half solved.”
one of us has the ability to experience it. It’s not a question • How smart somebody is doesn’t necessarily correlate
of if; it’s a question of when and for how long. with how much success they’re going to have. I have
Your Outline for Action found there is a correlation between success and how
open-minded someone is; their willingness to listen,
Here are some things to keep in mind as you look to find learn, and understand enhances their utility and
your golden hour: enables them to reach their full potential.
• A common obstacle to achieving the golden hour is • Author Stephen Covey developed a framework
negativity bias, the tendency of our brains to give where knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do it),
greater weight to negative events in our life—and and desire (why you want to do it) intersect to form
dwell on them longer—than positive events. habits that lead to action and results. Everything we
would like to get done, everything we want to com-
• The golden hour is all about focusing on expanding
municate, can be viewed through this simple lens of
our strengths.
what, how, and why.
• The potential for perfection exists in every organiza-
• Use the magic wand question: “If I gave you a magic
tion, but the question is who believes in it.
wand, what would you change?” Then ask follow-up

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 Superperformance
When you’re working with people, success isn’t just being right. It’s
about how much acceptance you can create. You’ve got to build agreement
and support and alignment with the direction you propose to go.

questions about how they think they would have to • Start off with the attitude that employees want to be
go about doing it and why they picked out that spe- successful, they want to have pride, they want to get
cific thing to change. respect.
• The effort you expend is almost always associated • Instead of pointing out who is doing poorly, what
with whichever metric is the reddest. are the things that you can emulate? Where are the
• Instead of defaulting to “Let’s figure out a problem places you’re succeeding?
and then correct it,” look at the successes in your
organization and figure out how to do more of that. CHAPTER 4:
Learn the Potential of We versus Me
PART 2: STRATEGY
While individuals often don’t matter as much as they think
they do, what really does matter is the team you work with.
CHAPTER 3: Together, that group has the ability to make really good
Escape from the Prison of Expectations things happen in any organization. When you start to think
that your value to the organization is not me but we, then
The prison of expectations exists almost any time in an orga-
you are on the right track.
nization when you have three elements at play: the metric
is highly visible, the expectations are high, and the con- Your Outline for Action
sequences for not meeting the goal are also high. Many
Too many leaders firmly plant themselves in their offices,
employees—leaders and frontline workers alike—are
losing touch with the people in their organizations who get
trapped in a prison of expectations. They (falsely) believe they
the work done. These leaders seem to believe that the world
can’t achieve zero loss, so they’re happy doing something
revolves around them and that they are more important
less than zero loss, often far less. They may be meeting their
than anyone else. And of course, that’s just wrong. Here are
numbers, but the potential is there to do so much more.
some ways leaders can focus on their teams:
Your Outline for Action
• Regularly put yourself in the shoes of the people
The prison of expectations is when we end up in the doing the work.
Goldilocks zone where we don’t work too hard, and we • Be a servant leader, prioritizing the needs of others
don’t work too little. We go along to get along, and we miss (your people, your customers, your vendors, your
out on turning golden hours into golden shifts. Here are community, and so on) over your own.
some things to keep in mind as you try to escape the prison
• When you put the emphasis on me, you are naturally
of expectations—or help others escape from it:
limited in what you can do. But when you put the
• Leaders sometimes think their people are sandbag- emphasis on we, then there really are no limits. You
ging or that they’re calling it in or not really applying can create your own dream team.
themselves—even not very good employees at all. • Engaging in after-action reviews helps employees
Experience shows that the way we’re being measured learn from both their mistakes and achievements.
forces us into this prison of expectations.
• A true leader communicates the what and the why,
• Most of us are happy to exist in a small zone where and then listens and learns how to enable their team
we might move up or down 5 percent—no big to achieve an outcome.
moves, no big splashes, no big failures.
• Maximizing your potential is directly proportional to

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 Superperformance

activating the overall potential of your team. Every able to see things for the value they create— can
interaction you have has the potential to activate help you do this.
collaboration.
• S = Q × A. Success is equal to the quality of the solu- CHAPTER 6:
tion times the level of acceptance. The quality of your
Make Focus Your Friend
solution and its level of acceptance is dependent on
the team’s ability to achieve high levels of assertiveness Whether it’s in a factory setting or even in the work that you
and cooperativeness, leading to true collaboration. do, there’s always a strong allure to pick up the easy or obvi-
ous thing to do, to take care of the low-hanging fruit. If you
• Be a Sherpa, that person who has the activation
have an infinite amount of time and resources, working on
energy to get the best out of everybody.
the easy things first could be perfectly fine. Eventually, every-
thing will get done. But in a lot of business and professional
CHAPTER 5: situations, you absolutely don’t have an infinite supply of
time or resources. And in many cases, you’re just not going
Find the Friction and Lower the to be able to get everything you want to accomplish done.
Temperature
Your Outline for Action
When you’re working with people, success isn’t just being
right. It’s about how much acceptance you can create. You have to focus on the things that provide the most value
You’ve got to build agreement and support and alignment for your customers. Here are some ways to do that:
with the direction you propose to go. Otherwise, you’ll nev- • Work breakdown structures are a great way to take
er get there. You can’t do it alone. large tasks and activities and distill them down to
Your Outline for Action manageable bodies of work.
• Use SIPOC—suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and
You always need to be self-aware, and you’ve got to be able
customers—to focus on the things that deliver the
to read the room—to feel the temperature. What can you
highest return and the greatest value.
do to find the friction and lower the temperature?
• Use a PICK chart (possible, implement, challenge,
• An experienced Sherpa reads the expedition’s and kill) to help you prioritize projects based on how
potential and pushes the group to their limit but not difficult they are and the value they deliver.
beyond it. Pushing beyond the limit means you have
• When you think about what you have to overcome and
goals the team can’t realistically achieve, and the
what you have to achieve, your first task is to try to meet
expedition will likely fail.
this target condition. A target condition is your state
• Everything in life is a distribution, and on average, after breaching the barrier between you and the things
not everything is average. Some of your people are you need to do; it’s an intermediate state of success.
going to perform a little bit better, and some are • If you know exactly where you’re going, and if
going to perform a little bit worse. you’re always clear about the target condition you’re
• To lower the temperature, you’ve got to find the moving to, then you have a really clear purpose and
actual source of the friction, that piece of sand in you’re well on the way to superperformance.
the gears that is the problem, versus taking a general • Use PDCA—Plan, Do, Check, and Adjust—and
perspective that the engine is overheating and you’ve Toyota’s A3 strategy to gain clarity on what you are
got to fix it somehow. doing, how you are doing it, and why it matters.
• The 80/20 rule—the Pareto principle—is always
a good place to start. For example, it’s likely that
20 percent of the people you’re looking for in the CHAPTER 7:
marketplace are generating 80 percent of the issues Build an Improvement Factory
you’re having of being shorthanded. Superperformance is facilitating a team to their full
• Start at the end of the process and work your way potential and understanding the bottlenecks and waste in
back to the beginning. The Kano model —being our improvement factory. It’s achieving our full throughput

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 Superperformance
If you look closely at any successful entrepreneur or business,
chances are that their success came about because they doubled down
on what was working, what customers valued.

potential. To succeed, you’ve got to be really focused on your analysis is so deeply embedded in manufacturing and other
constraints and on the high-value, low-effort things you can industries. But if you look closely at any successful entrepre-
do to overcome those constraints. You’ve also got to be willing neur or business, chances are that their success came about
to bypass activities that might get you all tied up in knots. because they doubled down on what was working, what
customers valued.
Your Outline for Action
Instead of the root causes of failure, let’s emphasize the
You are an improvement factory manager. Just like a real
root causes of success.
factory, your goal is throughput—to make the products
and services you deliver as fast as you can at the highest Your Outline for Action
level of quality, to weave straw into gold. As you build your
improvement factory, be sure to ask these questions: As humans, it’s natural for us to focus on our failures. We
need to change that focus from failures to successes. Know-
• What outcomes do we desire? ing your best demonstrated practice—what works, what you
» The golden lens: What does the customer want? do well, and why—is the most overlooked opportunity in
» What is preventing these outcomes? business. Here are some things to consider as you shift your
focus to finding your best demonstrated practice and root
» What is enabling these outcomes?
cause of success:
• What resources—people, material, machines, or
technology—do we depend on? • Teach the elephant to dance by turning your lumber-
ing organization into one that is nimble and responsive.
• What stages or phases do we work through, and
what does the work in progress look like? • When you find a best demonstrated practice, and
a specific group or individual producing this result,
• What does the success rate look like—overall and by
you have captured the what. Next, find the how—
phase or stage?
how they execute and produce this result—which
• What percentage of our improvements survive a will enable you to learn why they represent the best
year? Three years? demonstrated practice and get you to the root cause
• What are our bottlenecks to speed or effort? of their success.
• What is the quality of results, and does it need to be • Use 5W&1H (what, who, where, when, why, and
reworked? how), the 5 whys, and fishbone diagrams (also known
• What are the delays? (This is lost time.) as Ishikawa diagrams) to ask the right questions and
read the collaboration vibe in your organization.
• What are our strengths to build on?
» What could we do more of ?
» What could we share or replicate?
CHAPTER 9:
Learn a Trade and Deliberately Improve
CHAPTER 8: I suggest that you avoid getting hung up on the labels and,
instead, think of the practical application of continuous
Find the Root Cause of Success improvement tools and the ability to drive change as a
You are likely sitting on a goldmine, and the ironic thing vocation. The vocation of applying many of the tools and
is you might not realize it. As humans, we tend to focus methods described in this book to drive change for the
on our problems; it’s no accident that root cause failure better is something I call deliberate improvement.

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 Superperformance

Your Outline for Action that you shouldn’t try to do the right thing. The drive
toward focusing on a metric, a KPI, or some other mea-
Avoid getting hung up on the labels applied to the tools of surement of our success costs businesses literally billions of
continuous improvement; instead, think of the practical ap- dollars every year. That idea is more than a little counterin-
plication of these tools—and their ability to drive change— tuitive—that if you can’t improve what you can’t measure,
as a vocation. Here are some things to keep in mind as you but then you somehow measure it, it costs you billions of
approach this experience like learning a trade: dollars. But it comes down to the problem of sustainability.
• Understand that knowledge is necessary, but that Your Outline for Action
knowledge alone is useless without the skill and
ability to use it effectively. If you approach driving Companies have entire organizations, training, consultants,
change and improvement as a trade, you are already teams, money, and time wrapped up in their improvement
positioned for success. efforts, and 75 to 95 percent of the outcomes can’t survive
• The vocation of applying many of the tools and the warranty period on the results. That’s unsustainable.
methods to drive change for the better is deliberate Here’s how to avoid being one of those companies that is
improvement. pouring money down the drain:
• Troubleshooting is the practice of checking all the • Understand that sustaining results from
conditions that should be working to try and find improvement projects is a must-win battle.
anomalies—things that aren’t working or that are • The water you will carry is not only the size of the
out of place—and all improvement should start with bucket, but also how fast the bucket leaks. Choosing
troubleshooting. the right projects that you execute effectively to
• Before you look for the root cause, there’s one more produce sustained results is an order of magnitude
very critical question you need to answer: Is this a better than a shotgun blast of projects where only a
waste problem or a variation problem? very small number land.
• If you use root cause failure analysis (RCFA), pick • You can’t sustain what you can’t explain; you need to
out a specific instance and establish the chain of know why and how your solution works if you want
events that initiate from some specific cause, causes, to sustain the results.
or combination of events.
• At its heart, Kaizen (Japanese for “change for the PART 3 ACTION
better”) is about empowering the people who do the
work to improve their circumstances. It is best when
CHAPTER 11:
you have direct experience with the problem and
the people who will solve the root cause are the ones Walk the Talk—A Call to Action
who experience it. When we lack clarity on our target condition—what the
• DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) barrier or issue is we are overcoming to reach our longer-
is a process that focuses a team on a specific problem term goals—we are asleep. People who have purpose know
or opportunity. The team identifies factors that affect exactly what they’re working on and exactly what they’re
the process, gathers evidence, conducts analysis, tests trying to improve. And if you want to be a superperformer,
solutions, and produces quantifiable, sustainable you absolutely have to move with purpose.
improvements that impact the business.
Your Outline for Action

CHAPTER 10: Being deliberate is different from the ongoing slow burn of
what’s constantly happening in the background. If you want
Be Able to Clearly Explain WHY your improvement efforts to succeed, you have to be deliber-
We Will Sustain ate about them. Here are some tips on how to do just that:
Every business wants improved worker safety and morale. • To determine if you’re moving with purpose, take
Just because something is difficult to measure doesn’t mean note of this moment that you’re in right now. What

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 Superperformance

are you doing? Why are you doing it? Next, imagine Acknowledgments
this same moment exactly seven days from now, after
No success—no superperformance—is achieved alone. Just
an entire cycle of the common patterns in your life
as this book emphasizes the power of clarity, utility, and
has passed. In this moment, based on the intention
collective success, its creation was made possible through
that exists right now in your mind, what will be
the support, insight, and encouragement of many people
different seven days from now?
who helped shape both the ideas within these pages and the
• Your ability to provide the greatest utility is what sep- journey that led me here.
arates you from the rest of the pack. It’s what makes
you a superperformer. To the readers—those who are committed to pushing past
limitations, leading with clarity, and sustaining peak perfor-
• It’s not enough to walk the walk or talk the talk.
mance—may this serve as a guide to unlocking your own
You must be able to walk the talk, engaging teams
golden hours, eliminating ambiguity, and building a future
and organizations while having the skills (the vo-
defined by deliberate improvement and lasting success.
cation) to do what you say you’re going to do and
deliver results. Thank you all for being part of this journey. Your contribu-
• Carefully craft your elevator speech. It will be tions are a testament to the very principles in these pages—
your go-to method for doing your best to be a because real success is never achieved alone.
superperformer and to walk the talk. Be able to
communicate three things in just a few minutes:
the what, the how, and the why.

George Pesansky is a leadership and performance optimization expert with over 30 years of experience in
operational excellence, executive coaching, and organizational transformation. Known for his practical, results-
driven approach, he has led initiatives across industries to enhance efficiency, foster continuous improvement, and
turn high-performance moments into repeatable systems. George has trained and coached more than 10,000
professionals in Six Sigma, Lean, and World Class Manufacturing worldwide, while also authoring influential work
on peak performance and best practices. As founder of Capacity2Care, he encourages top performers to contribute
their talents to strengthen charitable organizations.

Superperformance: 8 Strategies to Reach Full Potential for Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization
by George Pesansky. Copyright © 2025 George Pesansky. Summarized by permission of the Publisher, Greenleaf
Book Group Press. ISBN 978-1-63908-135-6. Summary published by Soundview Executive Book Summaries®️.
Copyright 2025 Soundview, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited. For permissions
and reprints, please contact service@[Link]. 47SS11B

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